Home of Greg Bergé. Let's speak about JavaScript.

Deploy Ghost to heroku for free

Deploying Ghost to heroku is a true challenge, the Ghost team says that it is not supported. In fact, it's possible to deploy Ghost to heroku, but you must make concession. Actually Ghost doesn't support other storage system than file system, so if you deploy Ghost on heroku, you should not use the very nice upload feature.

Signup on heroku

The first step is signing up to heroku. If you are familary with heroku just go to the next step, else you can follow this quick start guide.

Download Ghost

The first thing to do is to download the last version of Ghost, as i am writing this article, the last version is 0.4.1, you can find it on the download page. Since Ghost offers blog hosting, the download page is not very accessible, but you can access it directly on https://ghost.org/download/.

After downloading Ghost, we can extract the zip into your blog directory. Let's call it my-blog.

$ unzip ghost-0.4.1.zip -d my-blog

Initialize the heroku application

Heroku deployment is based on git, so we must create a git repository to host Ghost source code.

Create a git repository is very simple, just go into your fresh created directory my-blog and run these commands.

Ghost release doesn't come with a .gitignore. If we install the application in development, we will need to install dependencies. The node_modules directory will not be ignored and the world will collapse. To avoid commiting modules, we must create a .gitignore with node_modules.